Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Note to PIAA

As a couple hundred people patiently waited for the completion of Monday's PIAA first-round baseball playoff game between Clarion and Villa Marie high schools at Slippery Rock University's Jack Scritchfield Park, one thing became abundantly clear.

It's an absolutely idiotic idea to schedule baseball tripleheaders on a weekday.

Such was the case Monday at Slippery Rock. The day started with a Class AA game between North Catholic and Franklin and was followed by the Clarion-Villa game, which lasted an excruciating 12 innings.

Meanwhile, fans, players and coaches from Trinity and Grove City sat and waited, and waited, and waited and, yes, waited.

The Hillers and Eagles, scheduled to start their PIAA Class AAA first round game at 6 p.m., didn't see the first pitch until 8:40 p.m. That's a delay of 160 minutes.

Talk about ridiculous.

The game wasn't completed until 10:45 p.m., give or take a minute. That's bad enough. Factor in the 90-100 minute drive back to Washington for the Hillers and they didn't get back until well after midnight.

That should not happen for a high school sporting event during the week.

The PIAA needs to schedule these weekday tripleheaders before the 1 p.m. start of Monday's game or eliminate them completely. I'm for the latter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mike I agree. Last year at the State Championships for baseball, there was a rain delay in game 2 and as a result game 4 didn't end until around midnight! Absolutely ridiculous!

Anonymous said...

Mike:

This is still High School sports, there should NEVER be weekday triple headers in any sport. Save the triple headers for Saturdays. But the greedy PIAA wants every nickle it can make.